El Paso County Sheriff’s Office aided feds’ Fast and Furious

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Marla

by Diana Washington Valdez \ El Paso Times
Posted: 11/03/2011 12:00:00 AM MDT

The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office is among local law enforcement agencies that were asked to assist with the controversial Operation Fast and Furious, in which guns were allowed to cross into Mexico in the hope of tracing them, officials confirmed Wednesday.

“Our HIDTA (High Intensity Drug-Trafficking Area) personnel assigned to DEA assisted with Operation Fast and Furious,” said Chris Acosta, a spokeswoman for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.

However, Sheriff Richard Wiles said, the department was not told its support was for that particular ATF operation.

“We assisted the DEA with a request for surveillance of an individual at a hotel, because they had information that an exchange involving drugs for weapons and money was going to take place,” Wiles said.

“This went on for six to eight months, but nothing happened. Later, we found out this operation was part of Fast and Furious,” Wiles said. “I don’t know if something came out of it later.”

Wiles said he did not want to get into the politics of the operation, and he added that his office will continue to assist with requests for legitimate law enforcement activities.

“When the federal agencies ask us for help, they don’t always tell us everything,” Wiles said.

DEA officials at the national level previously acknowledged that their agents helped with the operation. El Paso’s DEA office did not return a message about its role in Operation Fast and Furious.

Explosives, or ATF, launched the 2009 operation in Phoenix in an attempt to identify high-level arms traffickers who were supplying the Mexican drug cartels with weapons.The operation allowed weapons purchased in the United States to cross the border into Mexico.

Weapons associated with Fast and Furious have turned up in El Paso, Juárez and Columbus, N.M., and at murder scenes in Mexico and Arizona.

Last year, the El Paso Police Department, acting on a tip, discovered a stash house in far East El Paso that contained 40 new AK-47s and seven military bulletproof vests. The weapons, which were in a vehicle with Chihuahua plates, were shipped from a business in Vermont.

They arrested a man identified as Arturo Sandoval in connection with the seizures. He was indicted on federal weapons charges. Sandoval, 25, pleaded guilty to a charge of receiving firearms while under indictment and was sentenced to 6å years in federal prison.

“We did not assist with Fast and Furious in any way,” El Paso police Detective Mike Baranyay said. “Our investigators were able to connect the weapons they found at the stash house to Fast and Furious, and then they turned them over to the ATF.”

Travis Kuykendall, director of the West Texas HIDTA, said HIDTA itself was not part of Operation Fast and Furious.

“It was probably a request for help from the ATF in Phoenix, because the ATF in El Paso had such a small staff,” Kuykendall said.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Wednesday that he plans to question Attorney General Eric Holder about the gun-walking operations with Texas connections next Tuesday.

Holder is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about Operation Fast and Furious, and he can expect questions about other similar ATF operations such as Operations Wide Receiver and Gunrunner.

Cornyn, who is on the committee, said in a news media conference call that the Justice Department provided another “document dump” this week containing 650 government records about the operations.

One or more of the weapons were found near the scene of a shootout in 2010 in Arizona where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed.

Cornyn said he and other House and Senate members who are investigating also want to find out whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata was killed in Mexico with one of these guns.

“These operations were ill-conceived and fatally flawed,” Cornyn said. “What’s just as bad is that the Mexican government was not notified about the operations.”

Cornyn said he did not know yet whether the latest batch of government documents contains details about the Texas connections.

Justice Department officials said various federal, state and local law enforcement agencies assisted with the ATF’s Fast and Furious.

FBI officials in El Paso were not available for comment.

Tom Vinger, spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said he did not have any information on whether DPS helped in any of the operations.

Diana Washington Valdez may be reached at dvaldez@elpasotimes.com; 546-6140.

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Graphic Designer, Tea Partier, Blogger from Colorado.
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